Where To Watch?

Monkey Twins aired weekly on Netflix Thailand starting in June 2018. I just launched globally on September 1 and is available to all Netflix subscribers here.

Review

The Netflix series summary provides a nice summary: “Inspired by Khon dance drama and Thai martial arts, a fighter scarred by the past joins forces with a determined cop to battle an organized crime ring.”
After watching the first few episodes I can definitely say that the show is action packed with solid choreography, which is no surprise coming from the director of blockbuster action movies like Ong Bak 2. There’s plenty of Muay Thai and other cultural references ranging from traditional dance to town festivals.
This is a stereotypical Thai crime series at the core, which means that it’s fairly low budget for Western audiences. I expected the special effects and sound to be better coming from Netflix, but I guess that they’re producing the show mostly for the Thai market and global release is for a niche audience. It’s still a fun series for anyone interested in Thai language and culture, but there’s more thoughts on that in the next section.

Series Score: 8/10

Thai Language Notes

Monkey Twins will be difficult for many Thai language learners. There’s a lot of specialized vocabulary that you probably haven’t encountered in daily life, unless you’re involved in the mafia and drugs. In addition to the police and crime related vocabulary there’s other difficult cultural references from Thai dance to Muay Thai and even baton-twirling monkeys.
Luckily Netflix includes English subtitles, so you can still follow along even if you’re not an advanced Thai speaker. Still, this series gets a difficulty score of 8/10 based on the obscure vocabulary alone.

Difficulty Score: 8/10

Comment (2)

Just thought I’d drop a comment here to tell you I loved your app and I’d want to thank you so much for putting in so much work for what I consider one of the best resources out there on Thai learning. I absolutely love all the effort you’ve invested to include the cultural side of learning a language too. We’ve been slowly easing into life in Thailand, and you’ve no idea how much that has made our lives easier.